It’s easy for people to find various college rankings online each fall. It gradually becomes a unique guideline for prospective students applying for a university or college. In my opinion, college rankings only partially describe the level of universities, and hence, it’s time to push the university community to forget about college rankings.
College rankings cannot bring equivalent benefits for enrolled students. Most perspective students refer to a bunch of college rankings to find an appropriate college or university corresponding to their level of SAT scores or GPA. However, enrolled students don't realize that the rankings are meaningless when they want to accept a qualified education along with the ranking. For example, a top-50 university does not ensure students a top-50 educational quality definitely. The main purpose for most undergraduate students is to find a job. Obviously, the university doesn’t set up an output for fresh graduates to find a vocational position where the payoff is equivalent to college rankings.
College rankings may blur the initial purpose of education. The basis of an education is culture. However, universities would be prompted to pursue better rankings by means of manipulation. For example, universities would choose pumping out more research and citation, which make a great contribution to college rankings, instead of teaching. In this way, a university will convert to a research-oriented institute where the ratio of graduate students to undergraduates is high. In this case, the investment in the undergraduate education program would be inefficient, which has a negative effect on education.
College rankings are not accurate. As I mentioned above, teaching, research and citations account for the greatest part of the total score of college ranking. Grades on teaching are mostly dependent on research outcome; however, teaching itself is hard to grade. Individuals have their own criteria towards evaluating teaching; different lecturers would also lead to teaching quality variety. What’s more, ranking of teaching can hardly judge whether students are effectively educated or not. For example, a student may have good performance on an exam because of self-learning, that insufficiently demonstrates a college has a good education quality.
While college rankings are widely adopted to evaluate reputation and performance of universities, personally, they only cover a trace amount of the rating that determines how universities stand. It’s not prominent for college community to overestimate the value of the college rankings. (Tianyu)
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